Quotes from Robert O. Paxton

The principal objection to succumbing to the temptation to call Islamic fundamentalist movements like al-Qaeda and the Taliban fascist is that they are not reactions against a malfunctioning democracy.

One device used by fascist parties, but also by Marxist revolutionaries who have given serious thought to the conquest of power, was parallel structures. An outsider party that wants to claim power sets up organizations that replicate government agencies. The Nazi Party, for example, had its own foreign policy agency that, at first, soon after the party had achieved power, had to share power with the traditional Foreign Office.

Some young Germans and Italians of otherwise modest attainments found satisfaction in pushing other people around. 95 Fascism was more fully than any other political movement a declaration of youthful rebellion, though it was far more than that.

fascists pioneered in the 1920s by creating the first European "catch-all" parties of "engagement,"17 readily distinguished from their tired, narrow rivals as much by the breadth of their social base as by the intense activism of their militants.

Officially, Fascism was born in Milan on Sunday, March 23, 1919. That morning, somewhat more than a hundred persons,11 including war veterans, syndicalists who had supported the war, and Futurist12 intellectuals, plus some reporters and the merely curious, gathered in the meeting room of the Milan Industrial and Commercial Alliance, overlooking the Piazza San Sepolcro, to "declare war against socialism . . . because it has opposed nationalism.

In the early 1940s the social democratic refugee Franz Neumann argued in his classic Behemoth that a "cartel" of party, industry, army, and bureaucracy ruled Nazi Germany, held together only by "profit, power, prestige, and especially fear."1

23 The novelist Thomas Mann noted in his diary on March 27, 1933, two months after Hitler had become German chancellor, that he had witnessed a revolution of a kind never seen before, "without underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom, truth and justice." The "common scum" had taken power, "accompanied by vast rejoicing on the part of the masses.

Definitions are inherently limiting. They frame a static picture of something that is better perceived in movement, and they portray as "frozen 'statuary'" something that is better understood as a process.

Fascists are close to power when conservatives begin to borrow their techniques, appeal to their "mobilizing passions," and try to co-opt the fascist following.

It became harder for them to indulge their initial freedom to mobilize a wide range of heterogeneous complaints, and to voice the scattered resentments of everyone (except socialists) who felt aggrieved but unrepresented. They had to make choices. They had to give up the amorphous realms of indiscriminate protest and locate a definite political space3 in which they could obtain positive practical results.

The Italian Fascist Party, having discovered that in its first identity as a Left-nationalist movement the space it coveted was already occupied by the Left, underwent the necessary transformations to become a local power in the Po Valley. The Nazi Party broadened its appeal after 1928 to court farmers desperate over going broke and losing their farms. Both Mussolini and Hitler could perceive the space available, and were willing to trim their movements to fit.

Moreover, fascists do not invent the myths and symbols that compose the rhetoric of their movements but select those that suit their purposes from within the national cultural repertories. Most of these have no inherent or necessary link to fascism.

Once in power, fascist regimes confiscated property only from political opponents, foreigners, or Jews. None altered the social hierarchy, except to catapult a few adventurers into high places.

Fascisms seek out in each national culture those themes that are best capable of mobilizing a mass movement of regeneration, unification, and purity, directed against liberal individualism and constitutionalism and against Leftist class struggle.

Duplication of traditional power centers by parallel party organizations was a principal reason for the already noted "shapelessness" and the chaotic lines of authority that characterized fascist rule and set it apart from military dictatorship or authoritarian rule.

An inverse relationship exists in contemporary western Europe between an overtly fascist "look" and succeeding at the ballot box. So the leaders of the most successful extreme Right movements and parties have labored to distance themselves from the language and images of fascism.

fascist leaders enjoyed a kind of supremacy that was not quite like leadership in other kinds of regime. The Führer and the Duce could claim legitimacy neither by election nor conquest. It rested on charisma,42 a mysterious direct communication with the Volk or razza that needs no mediation by priests or party chieftains. Their charisma resembled media-era celebrity "stardom," raised to a higher power by its say over war and death.